your moment of calm

“It’s a couple of things that work beautifully in concert. First: no music. Audiences are so sophisticated, but what they’re not accustomed to is not being told how to feel,” Wyle says. “You take all that out and it forces a level of engagement where you’re now looking for clues within the frame of the screen, which forces you to look up from your phone. And I think that is extremely engaging, especially to young viewers who aren’t accustomed to being asked to participate in a nonpassive way in the viewing experience.

“Second point, shooting it with almost exclusively 50-millimeter or 65-millimeter lenses, which is the most comparable to the human eye—and only shooting from the point of view of a human being that’s present in this space. There are no cameras on gurney wheels going in the hallway. There’s no cameras on the ceiling looking down from a God point of view. You are limited to the perspective of a participant. You can look away, but you can’t leave, and it becomes an endurance test for you to stay on your feet as long as we’re on our feet. Which [brings me to my] third point: real time. Real time has an aggregate sense of tension that you don’t get in any other form of storytelling. What happened before is happening now, and these two things are going to add up to the next thing. And if we throw more ingredients into this cooker and keep ratcheting it up, it’s going to pop.”

Wyle makes eye contact for his next point, delivering it with a Robby-esque matter-of-factness. “Fourth point: The election went the other way,” he says with a shrug. “We could have been a really good show with a lot of nice things to say in a perfectly normal Kamala Harris universe. And instead we became almost a beacon of hope and humanity in an alternative universe. But in the midst of that, fifth point—this is essentially competence porn. You’re watching really smart, dedicated people do what only they know how to do at a level that you don’t know how to do it, and you’re so fucking glad that they’re there doing it, and compartmentalizing their own stuff to put your broken pieces back together. You’re so reassured by knowing that there are people out there that laugh and joke and have the ability to lock in like that.”

this is fucking unreal stuff from Noah Wyle on the magic of The Pitt. www.gq.com/story/noah-w...

They sell ANDOR action figures, of course, and of course the audience is 35-50-year-olds, but it's deeply funny to imagine children playing with little Luthen Rael and Saw Gerrera dolls.

CHILD 1: I think violence is not only justified, but demanded
CHILD 2: I agree, but haste could be our undoing

consider this your reminder to go back and re-read something nice that someone once wrote about you or your work!! there is much genuine kindness in the world

super fascinated by this wrt recent Marathon changes; was vicious default player behaviour a genuine surprise once the game made contact with the public? or is a pivot to pro-social incentives part of a long-term arc they're cultivating?

i think all the time about how it truly is this easy. just put half a thought into how affordance design shapes experience -- and then, gasp, maybe apply that to systems that people are forced to interface with as well as the fun stuff!!

what if we kissed at the Nuns' Island Circle of Perpetual Night

pretty wild when someone in real life uses a term you've only seen online like oh you're being piloted by the egregore too? cool

also as open as Blades is, you can kinda plot mini-arcs through faction associations; each run might have links or info from a couple other faction allies or enemies, which helps players get tangled in big webs quickly and also helps you know who and what to emphasize in narration or faction turns!

crew identity is key for what opportunities to present, harmonizing at first and then maybe tempting them to shift out of their comfort zone based on which factions they've aligned with or against!

Love low poly pigeon

As far as I know there is literally no reason for this, it is just an incredibly lucky coincidence that we get to enjoy for free

you know what small thing i'm looking forward to in the renewable future? road trips. for a long time it's been fraught to just get in a little vehicle that feels like a part of me and wander on the prairies. conflict minerals, nothing for free -- but. i am going to do that again, and lighter.

when this website dies meet me at the woody woodpecker racing for game boy color message board on gamefaqs

It is the wound in Time. The century’s tides, chanting their bitter psalms, cannot heal it. Not the war to end all wars; death’s birthing place; the earth nursing its ticking metal eggs, hatching new carnage. But how could you know, brave as belief as you boarded the boats, singing? The end of God in the poisonous, shrapnelled air. Poetry gargling its own blood. We sense it was love you gave your world for; the town squares silent, awaiting their cenotaphs. What happened next? War. And after that? War. And now? War. War. History might as well be water, chastising this shore; for we learn nothing from your endless sacrifice. Your faces drowning in the pages of the sea. Carol Ann Duffy, ‘The Wound in Time’ (2018)

War. And after that? War. And now? War. War.
History might as well be water, chastising this shore.

-Carol Ann Duffy, The Wound in Time, written on the occasion of the centenary of the first World War.
#everynightapoem

a cool thing about "cd's" is you push one button and it plays an entire album of music ad free and then (unless you request otherwise) it just stops and awaits further instruction. a very elegant system.

don't think I've heard anything as wrenching or sensitive, in turns built across an album, as La Dispute; Rooms of the House and Panorama are the records (Wildlife for adolescent moods). Softer options: Weather Station's "Wear" or Annabelle Dinda's "Satellites" (that whole album, but she's early)

This also happens between the network and showrunners/producers. I’ve occasionally been called in when a show is in trouble or shut down, and you’d be surprised the number of times we’ve identified, if not *fixed* the problem when I ask “what show do you think you’re making?” and the answers clash.

I would not have guessed that this is from a 2024 fantasy novel (The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett). What a sentence.

... I see the book won a Hugo Award. Yeah, that tracks.

body can't you let go of the score don't you understand the game is made up and the points don't matter

dermatologist told me that "skin has a memory" and i have been mulling the implications for days. how long will it keep the last forlorn touch of lost lovers? can it remember trigonometry or do i just gotta let that one go

every time you think you understand how good disco's writing is, how sharp, how intentionally overrwrought to frame your reading, you're wrong

wish i could feel genuine warmth at the professed care of the mother worm

in the era of ai psychosis, i find myself preferring those of marathon's AI contacts which speak in corporate jargon and give me clear boundaries as a contractor to those which pretend to care about me?

"when i love my foe, i always shatter their resolve" -- "i always get a second chance when i love my foe" -- "i always escape when i love my pursuer"

i love you language i love you specificity

so so nice to see all this love for a game that made me burst into tears when i considered the power of mechanically acknowledging "when I love my foe" as a qualifier on your character's abilities

A Borges story about a guy who gets AI to summarize all the world’s information for him, and then summarize the summary, until the AI has the whole world summarized into a single word. He sits alone at his desk, staring at the word, repeating it endlessly, certain he is experiencing everything

oh my god this is extremely funny

is he offering rootsborn wisdom or does he just want thnacks